A barn cat usually kept outdoors has been promoted to an indoor cat after his owner found a mouse in her bedroom.

Rural cat Jinx—or to use his official name, Mr Jinx Fuzzy Pants—lives on a Tennessee farm with his owners, which include sisters Claire Pruitt, 27, and Caroline Garrell, 18.

Despite growing up in the countryside, where farm living has shown Garrell everything from "animal births to bloody wounds to snakes and giant spiders," the teenager is still absolutely petrified of mice, her sister Pruitt told Newsweek.

And when she found a mouse in her bedroom, there was only one thing for it: fetch Mr. Jinx.

"She came running downstairs and flew out the door and we were asking what happened with no response," Pruitt laughed. "She knew just the man for the job."

A video shared to Pruitt's TikTok account @claire_pruitt on August 25 has almost half a million likes and 2 million views, as it shows Garrell striding through the house with Jinx in her arms, clearly a woman on a mission.

The clip, only seconds long, sees Jinx being carried through the room with Garrell making a worried humming noise, and Pruitt laughing in the background.

In words placed over the video, Pruitt wrote: "When a barn cat gets promoted because you saw a mouse in your room," and added in a caption: "Mr Jinx Fuzzy Pants here to serve."

TikTok users went wild for the clip, with one declaring: "You are now one of my elite employees!"

"Bro got his draft notice," another joked, with a third user agreeing he "got his deployment."

Pruitt told Newsweek that Jinx did not, in fact, catch the bedroom mouse that night, but as they live in a 150-year-old house, "mice are inevitable" and he may get a second chance.

"Our plan was to bring him back in the next night but couldn't find him anywhere. Later we found him with a chipmunk he had caught, so we joked that he had moved on to bigger and better prey," Pruitt said. "We are planning to bring him back in and give him another shot."

Pruitt told Newsweek that, over the years, they accumulated multiple cats as people just "drop them off at our barn or we find them stranded on the side of our road", once even finding a box of kittens dumped near their home.

Her mother-in-law previously worked with a local cat rescue, and thanks to her connections is still regularly called up for help with cats that need homes.

If the cats like being cuddled and held by humans, she brings them to a local cat rescue to be adopted—"and if they're a little wild, they come to my family farm," Pruitt explained.

When it comes to Jinx, who has been on their farm for over 10 years, the family cannot agree on where he came from.

"My mom swears one of my sisters brought him home on the bus and one of my sisters thinks my grandfather found him somewhere," she said.

While many cats across the United States are pampered family pets, some are more suited to a wilder type of life, can't tolerate living indoors with humans, and live on farms to help keep rodents away.

Some animal shelters provide barn cat programs, where cats in their care that wouldn't be suited as indoor pets are offered instead to farmers or those in rural communities as "employees", according to the Humane Society.

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